Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  Set in the steep hills above Maho Bay, the property was perhaps one of the worst-suited plots for sugarcane production on an island that sported several contenders for the title. The land was covered with a thick vegetation of jujube, mampoo, and tantan, the combined root structure of which had not done much to break up the rocky volcanic soil. The hapless son-in-law knew next to nothing about agriculture, and his new bride was quickly losing patience with his ineptitude.

  The Princess couldn’t yet understand the language of these pale unhappy people, but she knew enough of human nature to predict that both the union and this poorly conceived enterprise were unlikely to succeed.

  This island was a wicked place, the Princess soon decided.

  Her native sun had been replaced by a demonic imposter, one which boiled the air’s dense humidity. What little breeze filtered inland carried a damp moisture that caused her joints to stiffen and swell. Her fingers had never felt so thick, so heavy. Her body was constantly covered with a sticky, stinking layer of sweat.

  At the end of each day, the Princess lay down on her designated mat, a dusty bed on the floor of the lean-to shelter that was now her home. Tucked beneath the trees on the slope of a hill, the meager structure provided little protection from either the elements or the pestilence of insects that populated the island.

  The Princess ran her hand up and down the surface of her shin, her fingers counting the welts. Thankfully, the number had begun to decrease. At last, the microscopic beasts were starting to lose their appetite for her golden brown skin.

  As she waited patiently for the rest of the small farm’s inhabitants to drift off to sleep, her hand slipped up to her neck, instinctively searching for the iron medallion. With the edge of a fingernail, she traced the absent circular shape on the flat canvas at the top of her chest. The amulet’s intangible force was still with her. Somehow, its presence had followed her to this miserable island.

  The Princess risked a quick glance at the other women in the shack. Her fellow sufferers were a wide range of ages; their haggard faces represented an array of declining mental states. Some had been so beaten and traumatized in their travels to this remote island, they could no longer bear to remember their African roots. They refused to talk about their origins. Their spirits, she could see, had left them. Others retained scattered fragments of their essence, but it was slowly, inevitably ebbing away from them.

  She clutched the phantom metal disc at the base of her neck, taking strength from the emblem’s aura—that would not happen to her.

  The Princess lay on the mat in the darkness of the lean-to for another half hour, until she was sure that everyone else had fallen asleep. Then she rose quietly from the floor, taking care not to wake any of the other dozing women.

  As a sleeping silence fell in around the camp, the Princess crept stealthily out into the moonlight. She skirted around the edge of the clearing, her slim figure indistinguishable in the shadow of the surrounding trees.

  A moment later, she crossed the fledgling plantation’s scant fortifications. The owner’s quarters were not much more of a lodging than her own. All construction efforts were focused on the cane mill and boiler room, which would be needed if any of the first harvest managed to ripen.

  The Princess reached the far end of the wretched little settlement and paused to look back into the gray darkness. Scanning the area, she checked for movement, but not a soul was stirring.

  She turned and stepped out onto the nearest trail, fully expecting that someone would call after her to stop.

  All that could be heard was the buzzing of insects.

  She proceeded another ten steps and listened once more.

  No one had followed her. She was alone and ready to explore.

  20

  The Teepee Tent

  After a long day of travel that had begun at the threshold of his Brooklyn apartment, Conrad Corsair completed his journey with a satisfying tromp up the last steps into his tent at the Maho Bay eco-resort.

  With a flourish, he swung open the screen door and stepped inside. A few short steps took him across the room where he dropped his duffel bag onto the middle of a cot and slid his beat-up guitar case into the two-foot slot beneath. Sighing deeply, he straightened his short frame and stretched his arms above his freshly dyed head of ever-thinning hair.

  Months of anticipation had finally come to fruition. It was the third week of November, and he had arrived at the only place on earth he felt he truly belonged.

  Conrad took a slow turn around the tent’s dark interior. He had reserved this exact unit for the same two-week slot, going back every year since the eco-resort first opened. He knew each scratch and divot in the wooden floorboards, every nook and cranny of the cupboards that lined the back wall.

  “Ahhh,” he said fondly as if greeting an old friend. “Hello, Teepee Tent.”

  Conrad chuckled with his squeaky, elflike laugh, recollecting how Fast Eddie at the front desk always groused about his terminology.

  “You know, Conrad,” Eddie would say in that dry, humorless voice of his, “technically, it’s a reinforced tent. It doesn’t have any structural relationship to a teepee.”

  Conrad shook his head dismissively. He wasn’t one to let such minor details get in the way of his flawless reasoning.

  Conrad flipped on a light, unzipped the duffel, and rummaged through its carefully packed contents. In the months of preparation leading up to the trip, the inventory list had been scrupulously reviewed, revised, and, finally, memorialized on a laminated three-by-five index card. He could recite each and every item by heart.

  He checked the duffel’s side pocket for his ziplock bag of guitar picks and confirmed their location, feeling pleased with his meticulous organization. The bag contained several dozen tiny plastic triangles—each painted a different color.

  It was part of a new pickup line he’d developed, one he planned to debut on this trip. Once he had identified a woman worthy of his amorous attentions, he would select the guitar pick best suited for her particular color combinations.

  He had options for all contingencies. He could match a pick with the woman’s shirt, hair ribbon, eye color, or, if none of the above worked, bug-spray bottle—he had a special bug-spray pick he’d brought along for just that kind of emergency.

  He had practiced his opening line over and over in front of the bathroom mirror in his New York apartment.

  “Well, look at that, love,” he would say with expertly feigned surprise as he held the pick up to the targeted accessory. “We’re a perfect match.”

  Conrad beamed optimistically at the plastic bag. He’d passed a pretty young woman at the check-in desk earlier that evening who would be receiving the guitar pick treatment the next time he saw her.

  His eyes passed over to the duffel’s pile of neatly stacked clothing. Reaching out, he gave the top pair of ragged blue jeans a loving pat. These pants had made every trip to St. John with him; they were his favorite good luck charm. He’d had to lay off the jelly donuts the last couple of weeks in order to squeeze into them, but the sacrifice had been worth it, he thought, proudly rubbing the recently diminished round of his pot belly.

  Conrad ticked off the duffel’s remaining contents from memory: two weeks’ worth of underwear and T-shirts, open-toe sandals, a well-worn shower kit, and, last but not least, a particularly offensive pair of brand new Bermuda swimming trunks that, in his modest opinion, accentuated his brawny pecs.

  He flexed his arms out, imagining the scene at Maho Beach the following morning, where the Bermudas would be making their impressive debut.

  Oh, and, of course, he thought, dropping his pose, there was the manila envelope, tucked into the duffel beside the pile of clothing—it and its contents were the only other items making their maiden voyage to St. John.

  Conrad lifted the legal-sized envelope from the duffel and carefully placed it on a nightstand next to the cot. He stared intently at its worn, bulging surface. His aging blue eyes g
littered with intensity.

  This, he thought proudly, represented his life’s most important achievement. He was about to make a significant contribution to this island, and, he thought with a respectful nod to the nearest screened wall, his beloved teepee tent.

  Stepping away from the cot, Conrad circled around its end post to a small mirror hanging on the tent’s back wall. The scattered moonlight filtering into the tent combined with the lightbulb over the bed to generate a dim reflection.

  Admiring the fresh dye job he’d applied the day before, he pulled a black plastic comb out of his back pocket and carefully ran it over the top of his head. Grinning toothily, he stared at his hollowed out cheeks and skeletal smile.

  Feeling confident and self-assured, Conrad returned to the cot. After moving the duffel to the floor, he flopped down onto the loose bedsprings, kicked off his sneakers, peeled off his socks, and stretched his skinny body the length of its twin-sized frame.

  His hand reached into a shirt pocket for a package of cigarettes he’d purchased on his way through town—special ones to celebrate his first night back on St. John.

  Opening the paper bag, he pulled out a sample. As he passed the hand-rolled cylinder under his nose, he took in a deep whiff of its unlit fragrance.

  “Ah, yes,” he sighed contentedly, noting the combination of grassy floral notes. “Perfect.”

  Conrad fished a lighter out of another pocket and lit the cigarette. The tip of the paper glowed red as he wrapped his thin lips around the opposite end and sucked heat through the interior hallucinogens. His head began to swim as a billow of smoke filled the air above the cot.

  “Hey there, Mister District Attorney Man,” he mumbled groggily at the tent’s ceiling. “You can’t reach me here—I’m way outside your jurisdiction…”

  Drifting off into the hazy edges of a dream, Conrad quickly found himself in a New York City courtroom, explaining his latest astute arguments to a judge, who sat in a black robe behind an elevated desk.

  But just as Conrad warmed to a critical point in his dialogue, he was interrupted by a rustling in the woods outside his tent.

  “Aw, no worries, Your Honor-man,” Conrad assured the tent’s blank ceiling. “That’s just a mongoose. Those things are half-blind. They’re always rooting around down there beneath the teepee tent.”

  The judge leaned over his bench and cocked a suspicious eyebrow at him.

  “Mr. Corsair, a witness has previously testified that the mongoose is a diurnal animal, generally active only during the day.”

  Conrad pulled himself upright on the cot, puzzling as the rustling sound grew nearer. It sounded as if a large creature were pacing a circle on the forest floor beneath him.

  “Could be a hermit crab, Judge. Those things are crawling around at all hours.”

  He took another pull on the cigarette as a second noise permeated the tent—one that stopped Conrad midsmoke. He coughed spastically as the fumes stagnated in his lungs. It was a lyrical, mystical voice, singing, chanting almost, and it appeared to be coming from the nearby woods.

  Conrad jumped off the cot, leapt across the floor, and swung open the tent’s screen door. His eyes scanned the surrounding trees, searching for the source of the sound. There it was again. And he was certain of it now—it was coming from a woman. This was definitely something that needed to be checked out.

  Cautiously, he proceeded down the wooden walkway leading away from his tent, waiting for his woman-seeking sonar to hone in on the location of the creature with the beautiful voice.

  As he reached a T-intersection with one of the main staircases, he thoughtfully drummed his fingers along the rough surface of the waist-high railing. He tilted an ear toward the upper portion of the resort, where the check-in desk and the dry goods store were located.

  “Nope,” Conrad mumbled out loud. She wasn’t up there.

  He turned left on the staircase and headed down toward the beach. The wooden planks that made up the walkway creaked beneath his bare feet as he descended. His feet thunked faster and faster as the sound grew louder.

  Little of the sky was visible through the canopy of trees that covered the stairs, but it was a clear night—he could sense it. He felt the moon’s tugging pull, working in conjunction with the woman’s lyrical voice, leading him down to the ocean.

  He reached a flat transition point on the stairs with a bright blue recycling tub and a water spigot mounted to a wooden post. After sprinting across the ten-foot landing, he hurtled down the next flight of steps. He had almost reached the beach—he could see the bottom of the stairs up ahead.

  A moment later, the overhang of limbs and leaves parted, and the stairs emptied out onto the sand. Conrad gingerly picked his way across the layer of twigs and debris that had collected near the shore. The wide looping expanse of Maho Bay stretched out before him, lit by an eerie spectral moon that shimmered in the gentle lapping waves.

  At the far end of the beach, near the boulders that blocked off the curving path of the shoreline toward Mary’s Point, a shadowed figure stood in the water. It was the woman who had summoned him from the teepee tent.

  She wore a close-fitting beaded vest and a sarong tied around her narrow waist. From her neck hung a silver medallion—formed in the circular shape of the sun.

  Conrad blinked, desperately trying to focus his drug-addled vision.

  He could see her mouth moving, her lips forming the words that floated across the sand toward him.

  The woman tilted her head back, so that her face caught the moon’s full illumination. Her skin was a creamy cocoa color, luminous in the water’s reflection. She motioned with her hand, as if asking him to join her, luring him into the ocean.

  “Me?” Conrad asked incredulously, pointing at his chest.

  She nodded, the springing coils of her dark shiny hair bouncing as she sang out another strange, unearthly chorus of her song. Then, with a last flirtatious wave, she dove into the shallow water and began swimming out into the bay.

  Fervently wishing he had stopped long enough to change into the Bermuda swimming trunks, Conrad quickly rolled up the legs of his blue jeans. Without further hesitation, he waded into the water and began swimming after the Amina Slave Princess.

  Northeast of the eco-resort, on a hill in the dense woods that covered Mary’s Point, Beulah Shah lurched along the faint outline of an overgrown, long-forgotten trail.

  Football-sized boulders pushed up through the dirt, their sharp, jutting edges slicing through her thin-soled shoes. Calabash branches scratched her face and ripped at the sleeves of her loose-hanging navy blue shirtdress. She paid no heed to any of these hindrances.

  The tapering path’s loose, rocky base became more difficult to discern as it disappeared into a tangled mass of ferns and oversized agave plants, but Beulah needed no guideposts. She knew the route by memory.

  Higher and higher, the old woman climbed, pushing her way through the underbrush, swiping at the dangling curtains of ropelike vines that snaked down from the treetops—until slowly, the canopy began to fall away, revealing a star-strewn sky and, across the water, a moonlit Maho Bay.

  She reached into the holster of a ragged sport belt secured around her tiny waist and pulled out a bottle of water. Unscrewing the lid, she tipped the bottle to her lips. A few gulps later, she gummed her toothless mouth and wiped the sweat from her brow.

  Taking care with her footing, she crawled onto a rocky outcropping that gave her a better view of the bay. From this vantage point, Beulah could see almost the entire outline of St. John’s northern coast, a ruffled skirt of tree-rimmed beaches and the occasional odd-shaped cay dotting the water just beyond the shoreline.

  In front of her ledge, bobbing out beyond the rounded blunt of Mary’s Point, she spied a small catamaran powerboat tethered to an anchor. Red lettering painted along the white side of the boat read WATER TAXI.

  Beulah watched as a brawny, muscular man threw an inflatable yellow dinghy over the side of the boat
, and then followed it into the water. After pulling the rip cord on a tiny black motor attached to the stern, he drove the dinghy inland toward the narrow divot of an inlet cove, where it disappeared into the shadowed darkness.

  To her left, Beulah’s vision took in the sweep of the hillside that housed the eco-resort and its protected beach on the sand below. Her eyes squinted as she focused her gaze on a scrawny, splashing man desperately paddling out into Maho Bay.

  The mysterious woman who had drawn him into the water was nowhere to be seen.

  The next morning found Conrad Corsair snoring sleepily into his pillow, facedown on his cot inside the teepee tent, wearing nothing but his Bermuda swimming trunks and a fogged-up pair of goggles. His spindly arms and legs were tangled in his bedsheets, still occasionally flailing about in a paddling motion as he tried to catch up to the singing woman who had disappeared into the ocean near Maho Bay.

  The manila envelope lay on the floor by the nightstand, where it had fallen the night before during a frantic search for the ziplock bag of guitar picks. The end flap had popped open, revealing a portion of the contents stuffed inside.

  A ragged stack of photocopied papers took up much of the envelope’s volume. The top sheet was stamped on its upper right-hand corner with the imprint of New York City’s largest public library. Part of a map was visible—it appeared to be a delineation of the west coast of Africa, heavily marked with penciled annotations pinpointing the known locations of Danish slave forts from the 1700s.

  A slight breeze siphoned through the tent, riffling the papers. The top sheet peeled back to reveal the surface of the one underneath.

  A second map, similarly stamped and covered with penciled handwriting, portrayed a far different geographical location—the island of St. John, expanded to highlight the area around Maho Bay.

  Next to the pile of papers, hanging halfway out of the package, was a leather rope necklace connected to a circular iron amulet forged in the shape of a sun.